William James: Framing the Plurality of Green Values
by
Piers H.G. Stephens,
Philosophy Department,
University of Georgia,
Athens
GA 30602
ABSTRACT
Amidst the wider discussions of civic and environmental pragmatism the name of William James has seldom been invoked, and if anything the literature of the anti-pragmatists in environmental philosophy has especially excoriated him. In this paper, I look at the ways in which, contrary to these misleading characterizations, James’s philosophy may be seen to offer a framework of value theory in which a rich plurality of environmental values can be situated and articulated. I shall explain James’s accounts of value and transformative experience, rooted in his psychology but also found most notably in the essays “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”, and connect these to his fascination with voluntary poverty and his strong opposition to economic reductionism, especially prevalent in the social critique of his later years. I shall then develop and apply the Jamesian perspective further, both historically and in terms of contemporary relevance. First I shall illustrate the ways in which James’s essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” has been misunderstood by green critics, and indicate its actual historic significance, which is very different: in fact, both Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and Jimmy Carter’s attempts to wean the USA off its oil addiction drew on this essay for their inspiration. Finally, I shall draw all the diverse strands together to indicate how a Jamesian pragmatic naturalist perspective can explain and frame a green vision that can recognize and philosophically incorporate the value of wild nature whilst also speaking to urban political concerns and quality of life issues.
William James: Framing the Plurality of Green Values
INTRODUCTION
Ever since the publication of Anthony Weston’s essay “Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics” in the journal Environmental Ethics in 1985, and the debate that resulted[1], pragmatist thought has been a significant player in academic environmental philosophy. Indeed, arguably pragmatism was a significant player in environmental policy even before the familiar contemporary debates began: Ben Minteer has argued in his book The Landscape of Reform that a tradition of environmental pragmatism covering both the land and civic society was a key player in environmental policy, civic planning and land use legislation in American society through much of the first half of the 20th century, and can be seen in such figures as Liberty Hyde Bailey, Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye, as well as – much more controversially – Aldo Leopold[2]. For Minteer, the familiar construct of the history of American environmentalism as a debate between conservationism and preservationism that might perhaps be seen as synthesized in the Leopoldian land ethic is misconceived in that it leaves out the vital third player, civic pragmatism, which he sees as inspired especially by John Dewey and to a lesser extent by Josiah Royce. Other scholars have tracked the conceptual links between environmental concern and pragmatism back still further in US history and heritage: Paul Thompson and Thomas Hilde’s essay collection adds to Dewey and Royce by bringing in figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as well as Emerson, Thoreau and even John Steinbeck amongst the field of agrarian thinkers with a pragmatist aspect, whilst Scott Pratt tracks a line of influence on pragmatism right back to Native American thought[3]. Though pragmatism is often attacked for its perceived anthropocentrism and/or instrumentalism, its core evolutionary focuson the self as being fundamentally relational and as engaged in continuous mutually impressing interactions with the surrounding environmentmakes it at the very least a plausible candidate for framing the values involved in a persuasive environmental ethics and politics.
Yet the discussion of pragmatism has until recently been marked by a curious absence. Reading these discussions, it would be easy not to realize that the primary promotion of the pragmatic philosophy at the 20th century’s beginning was done by none of these thinkers but instead by William James, who at the time of his death in 1910 was generally recognized not only as the leading American philosopher of his day but also as the finest psychologist in the United States’ history.So strange and pervasive has this invisibility of James in environmental scholarship been that even occasions that appear to be crying out for a Jamesian acknowledgment have seen him neglected.A good example of this is found in Bryan Norton’s book Sustainability[4] where, drawing on the work of Ben Minteer and Curt Meine, Norton argues that Aldo Leopold was significantly influenced by Yale University president Arthur Twining Hadley. Norton uses the linkage as a vital touchstone, claiming that Leopold “was exposed to, and quoted, these pragmatist ideas and that his earliest account of a conservation ethic (written in 1923) embodied the pragmatist definition of truth” and that what “Leopold borrowed from Hadley was the key idea that longevity over multiple generations provides a second, independent criterion of the success of a culture”[5]. The pragmatist definition of truth in question, as given by Hadley and Leopold on this reading, is that truth is “that which prevails in the long run”, itself an adaptation of William James’s formulation in Pragmatism (1907) that truth is that which prevails “in the long run and on the whole”, and indeed Norton notes that Hadley described himself as “a follower of William James”[6]. On Norton’s argument it was, therefore, essentially a working out of Jamesian truth that animated Leopold’s 1923 essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest”, yet no further investigation of the James connection follows in Norton’s treatment, and when he turns to a pragmatist reading of the Leopoldian heritage a few pages later, Norton invokes “Dewey’s particularly clear and compelling explanation of the not-yet-fully-understood consequences of Darwin’s revolutionary idea”[7], after which the possibility of a James-Leopold link vanishes behind the Dewey-Leopold connection that Norton wants to forge and James, for no reason that is explained, drops entirely out of the picture. Whatever the merits of Norton’s claim of pragmatist influence on Leopold, he evidentlyassumes that any insights from James will be faithfully adopted and then improved by Dewey.
I have argued elsewhere that the assumptions of Dewey’s faithfulness and superiority to James in environmental thought are in at least some respects misplaced[8], and I will not repeat all those arguments here. Rather, I suspect that some of the wariness towards James from environmental philosophers may come from misunderstandings of his views that were popularized by some of the original founders of the academic discipline of environmental ethics in the 1980s and whose inaccuracy not yet been popularly recognized in the field. Holmes Rolston especially picked out James as a figure for criticism whilst Eugene Hargrove made significant attacks on pragmatism as a philosophy that is both reductionist and economistic[9]. Two James passages and an essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War”, are Rolston’s bugbears, the last of which he interprets as a call for moral war against nature, and whilst I have dealt with all these criticisms in depth elsewhere[10], it is worth briefly noting the broad character of the charges in relation to “The Moral Equivalent of War”.Rolston, who rather oddly chooses to support his criticism with a quotation from a completely different essay, appears to follow William Leiss in seeing James’s essay as a “Baconian scenario” in which “the aggressiveness involved in human ambition” can be “turned loose against the environment... without the sense of guilt”[11], and thus regards it as an expression both of radically anthropocentric subjectivism and of a runaway instrumentalizing dynamic that many anti-pragmatist environmental thinkers appear to associate with pragmatism. Indeed, the interconnected suspicions that pragmatism is fundamentally subjectivist, anthropocentric, reductionist, and a form of freewheeling instrumentalismare all common amongst the anti-pragmatist camp, and whilst as stated I have dealt with them at length elsewhere, I mention them here as a backdrop because my treatment of James’s moral philosophy should indicate in passing how mistaken these views are in this context.
Against this view of pragmatism in general and James in particular, I intend to set the evidence of James’s psychological claims and his account of value emerging into the world. Since James wrote relatively little in terms of formal ethics despite the profound centrality of moral engagement to his character, my treatment will to some extent be speculatively interpretative and involve the cashing out of implications of Jamesian thought, but I think not in ways that grossly violate the spirit of his ideas. I shall further argue that James’s late arrival into political activism featured a strong latent critique of acquisitive industrialist expansionism as well as emphases on spontaneity and receptivity that fit well with green emphases on transformative values found in nature experience. With these aims in mind, I now turn to James’s account of value in both his ethics and psychology.
William James: Value, Sentience, Consciousness and Ethics
In his essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, James subdivides the business of ethics into three questions: the psychological question of the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments, the metaphysical question of the meaning of moral terms such as “good”, “ill” “obligation” and so forth, and the casuistic question dealing with “the measure of the various goods and ills that men recognize”[12]. Since at this stage I am primarily concerned with indicating the basics of his accountof value, I shall initially focus on the first two of these, connecting James’s ethical observations to the psychological viewswith which they are obviously connected.
In ethical terms, James sees the origins of moral ideas in physical states and their resultant associations, maintaining that empiricist thinkers like Bentham and Mill “have done a lasting service in taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have arisen from association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain”, but at the same time, he acknowledges that more complex moral feelings, such as feelings of fitness or revulsion at discord and inconsistency, may be emergent but are not simply reducible to earlier simple forms: the “feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc – are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own sake”, such that the “nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say”[13]. His account is thus naturalistic but not reductionist, acknowledging that purely “inward forces are at work” in such cases, while maintaining that the “higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary” and that they “present themselves far less in the guise of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend”[14]. Both inner forces and outer stimuli are thus implicated in the roots of all forms of value, a point to which we shall return, but the habitat where ethical values exist “can only be a mind which feels them” for “no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply”. Accordingly, moral value enters the world with conscious life: “The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that being’s consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe”[15]. James next expands the criterion to evaluate the beginning of genuine value claims and value conflicts, where a concrete claim can be made by a being on another. For him, these emerge from the demands of the beings involved and generate prima facie obligations; it is not that there is a pre-existing abstract moral order in which the superior validity of one claim over another is pre-established. Rather, the case is that obligations emerge from claims and “there is some obligation wherever there is a claim”. Genuine philosophical problems of ethics emerge when claims compete. “Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way”.Accordingly, such words as “good”, “bad” “obligation” and the like do not denote abstract absolute items but instead “have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds”[16]. If this is the case, however, then the task of the philosopher must be to find an impartial test by which to evaluate competinggoods, perhaps by finding some common coin, such as utilitarian happiness, in terms of which all competing goods can be evaluated. James maintains that whilst the utilitarians have probably come closest in this quest, nonetheless there are “innumerable acts and impulses that never aim at happiness” and so he suggests instead the wider principle that “the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand”, with demand itself being pluralistically conceived because the “elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those of physics are”[17].The fact that demands conflict with each other both within each individual life and between individuals takes us to the third question, the casuistic one of the proper measure of the various goods and ills. For James, it is evident that ideals conflict and that “there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind”. Accordingly, since not all demands can be satisfied, James suggests that “the guiding principle for ethical philosophy” must “be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can”; the best act, accordingly, must be that “which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions”, and “those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed”, thus leading finally to James’s conclusion that “the victory to be prayed for is that of the more inclusive side – of the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished party’s interests lay”[18]. We must, accordingly, “act as to bring aboutthe very largest total universe of good which we can see”, voting “always for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole”[19].
There are legitimate worries about this scheme, perhaps the most important of which is pointed out by John K. Roth, namely that James fails to build in qualitative distinctions about the weight or priority to be given to competing demands[20]. However, it does suggest some potentially positive green options: firstly, James’s attention to sentience and consciousness appears at least on the surface to mandate a nonanthropocentric approach to ethics, and secondly the injunction to maximal inclusivity might have encouraging implications for ethically charged models of sustainability. I shall turn here to the issue of nonanthropocentrism, for a neglected early paper in environmental ethics by Robert C. Fuller made precisely this argument. Fuller commends James's essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” as a base for environmental ethics, regarding the prescriptive injunctions in it - the rejection of hedonic utilitarianism as incompatible with justice, advocating instead the fulfilling of as many claims for satisfaction as possible whilst leaving a maximal number of claims undamaged in their potentiality for actualisation - as being a promising rough map for our ethical treatment of both the human and the non-human world, whilst acknowledging that further work would be necessary to ground an ethic to deal with inanimate nature[21]. The problem with this effort of Fuller’s is that Fuller writes throughout as if sentience and consciousness were interchangeable synonyms, with all living things being sentient[22], whereas James himself was more careful than this, as we shall see.
Fuller's error can be seen in considering the active role that consciousness plays for James, in which selectivity is of the essence. First of all, in the Principlesof PsychologyJames distinguishes living from non-living motion, contrasting the unvarying clinging of iron filings to a card-covered magnet with the varying attempts to get around an obstacle which are manifested by a frog seeking air when apparently trapped underwater. The critical point that James wishes to illustrate here is that of selective activity, of the spontaneity manifested by conscious living things in attaining their goals, leading him to the conclusion that it is the “pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment” which constitutes “the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality”[23]. This definition serves two purposes, for it distinguishes not merely animate from inanimate activity, but also spontaneous actions from reflex actions and simple stimulus response, since the latter respond in a fixed manner to stimuli, not a variable one.